Cease-fire frays in Syria’s south as rebels launch new offensive

BEIRUT – A cease-fire brokered by Turkey and Russia two months ago is fraying along Syria’s southern border as rebel forces launch their largest offensive in the area in more than a year.

Monitors, activists and an aid group said fighting raged for a fourth day Wednesday between opposition and pro-government forces in the southern city of Daraa, pushing the number of dead and wounded past 60.

A nationwide cease-fire has largely held since late December, when President Bashar Assad’s forces recaptured the flash-point northern city of Aleppo. That victory brought what remained of the armed opposition to a crisis point, bolstering the hand of its Turkish backers to negotiate a truce with one of the Syrian government’s staunchest allies, Russia.

But rebel guns had been largely silent in southern Syria for more than a year, constrained by infighting and the directives of the fighters’ powerful Jordanian backers across the border.

In an unusual development for Syria’s knotty conflict, the rebel offensive in Daraa appeared to have been launched without international support. The fighters began pushing through the southwestern district of Manshiyah on Sunday, detonating car bombs and at least one powerful tunnel bomb.

According to activists and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring network, the government has carried out intense airstrikes in response.

Medics said at least 25 people had been killed in the days of fighting, six of them from a single family. Thousands have fled the area, many seeking refuge on countryside farmland and orchards.

The International Rescue Committee said a rocket attack late Monday had injured four health workers and caused major damage to a clinic it supported in Daraa’s Balad district.

Amanda Catanzano, the organization’s senior director for international policy and advocacy, warned that similar attacks in Aleppo and other cities had been a precursor to heavy fighting.

“It’s distressing to see the strategies that resulted in so many civilian deaths in Aleppo begin to play out elsewhere in Syria. There can be no peace in Syria without accountability for these repeated attacks against civilians,” Catanzano said.

But activists defended the fighting, insisting that the rebel offensive would bring a much-needed “morale boost” ahead of peace talks scheduled for Feb. 23 in the Kazakh capital, Astana.

“This is a battle to bring spirit back to the opposition,” said Ahmed Almasalma, a media activist from Daraa’s western countryside.

Although an earlier round of talks in Astana ended inconclusively, it is hoped that the new meetings will pave the way for a resumption of the Geneva peace process brokered by the United Nations.

Syria’s conflict, almost 6 years old, has gone through several cycles of cease-fires broken by ferocious violence. But the latest truce is playing out in a dramatically altered military and diplomatic landscape.

Rebel forces mostly have been boxed into the northwestern province of Idlib. Internal tensions have boiled over into open war there, with hard-line factions allied to al-Qaida coming out on top.

Pro-Assad forces hold all the most important urban centers in the country, and the president’s departure is no longer a precondition for the rebels’ participation in any peace process.